Sweatshop hackers work to unlock iPhone

Engineers and hackers are working around the clock and skipping their children …

According to IDG News Service, a company based in the UK is working around the clock without overtime in order to crack the iPhone's security system. The system in question is, of course, the fact that the iPhone is locked to a certain carrier (AT&T) and prevents non-AT&T customers from using the device as a phone.

The engineers hacking for Uniquephones are based in several countries and are fighting against a sweltering summer heat wave in order to allow iPhone customers to use a SIM card and network-supported carrier of their choice. John McLaughlin, the man in charge of the operation and founder of Uniquephones, told IDG that "there is at least a two-step process to unlocking an iPhone." As it turns out, unlocking the phones is quite a bit more complicated than some of us thought.

So far, he has had success with step 1: unlocking the actual AT&T activation process, so that other AT&T SIM cards can work with the phone and be actviated through iTunes. This is pretty much what DVD Jon did the other day when he released his iPhone crack to unlock the iPod/WiFi features without an AT&T activation. However, the next big step is unlocking the phone so that it allows all SIM cards, and unfortunately "any attempt to change the firmware of an iPhone so it can support another carrier's SIM card breaks the phone." In order to get around this, Uniquephones engineers will need to "[break] the encryption process that protects the token sent through the iTunes activation process to an iPhone's firmware."

Originally, McLaughlin thought unlocking the iPhone was going to be as easy as providing AT&T customers with unlock codes, but "sometime over the weekend after iPhones went on sale, unlock codes from AT&T for about 6,000 iPhones disappeared from the carrier's database." Of course, unlocking the iPhone turned out to be a bit trickier than planned. In the US, it is legal to unlock a locked-GSM phone under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, although McLaughlin says Apple will "probably come after us for copyright infringement."

The iPhone firmware crack from Uniquephones will cost users $49.99 when it is finished. If other hackers get to it first, McLaughlin has confidence that "it won't be hard for [Uniquephones] to replicate what others have done once the encryption is cracked."